The school bags are by the door. Breakfast is half-eaten. The toddler is spinning in a circle for reasons that make complete sense to the toddler.
Welcome to the Lorrikeets age group — and welcome to one of the most wonderfully, exhaustingly rich developmental seasons of your child’s life.
At Fireflies Early Learning in Cooroy, our Lorrikeets Toddler room is built for exactly this: the 2–3 year old who is equal parts curiosity and chaos, who learns through movement and mess and music, and who is busy constructing an understanding of the world at a pace that would exhaust most adults.
In our Lorrikeets room, every day includes creative arts, music and movement, construction play, outdoor adventures, literacy experiences, and dramatic play — because each of those activity types is doing something essential and irreplaceable in a toddler’s developing brain and body.
Here, we have taken the heart of our Lorrikeets program and translated it into seven home activities that any Cooroy family can do — often with what is already in the house, already in the garden, or already in the Noosa hinterland backyard right outside the door.
Each activity is simple. Each one is play. And each one, as you will see, is doing far more than it looks like.
🎨 1. Nature Paintbrushes and Mud Art
What it looks like: Take a walk around the garden and collect natural “brushes” — a leaf, a twig, a feather, a piece of bark, a pine needle cluster. Set up a shallow tray of mud (real mud, the kind from the garden), a piece of old cardboard or thick paper, and let your toddler paint freely with whatever they found.
The Lorrikeets connection: Creative arts in our Toddler room is not about pretty outcomes. It is about open-ended, sensory-rich exploration that encourages self-expression and imagination — and that connects children to the natural materials around them. At Fireflies, we are deeply committed to sustainability and nature-connection, and this activity carries that spirit directly into the home.
What children are building:
The physical experience of squeezing mud, dragging a leaf through colour, pressing a feather against paper is one of the richest fine motor experiences available to a toddler — using the same precise hand muscles that will one day hold a pencil. Sensory processing deepens. Vocabulary grows: sticky, smooth, rough, wet, brown, smear, swirl. And the creative act of making something with found materials builds a relationship with the natural world that a screen never could.
Tip: Resist the urge to guide. The process is the point. Whatever your toddler creates is exactly right.
🎵 2. Kitchen Band and Dance Parade
What it looks like: Pull out the kitchen percussion section: wooden spoons and saucepan lids, a container of dried pasta, a pair of empty yoghurt tubs with rice inside. Turn on any music with a clear beat — folk, pop, traditional music from your own cultural background — and parade around the house.
The Lorrikeets connection: Music and movement is one of the daily pillars of our Lorrikeets room, and it is one of the activities that never fails to transform a difficult afternoon into a joyful one. Our educators use music intentionally — not as background noise, but as a rich developmental experience.
What children are building:
Dancing builds bilateral coordination — the ability to use both sides of the body together, including crossing the midline — which is directly linked to later reading readiness. Rhythm and beat develop phonological awareness (the ability to hear and play with the sounds in language). Instrument play builds fine motor strength and cause-and-effect understanding. And singing together — especially songs from your own culture and language — builds vocabulary, memory, and the emotional bond between parent and child that is the most powerful learning scaffold in existence.
According to the Early Years Learning Framework V2.0 (EYLF), children’s identities are deeply connected to language, culture, and belonging. A kitchen band parade that includes songs from your family’s heritage is early childhood education at its most genuine and most meaningful.
Tip: Slow songs count too. Hold your toddler and sway. Movement does not need to be energetic to be developmental.
🏗️ 3. Open-Ended Construction: The Loose Parts Box
What it looks like: Collect a box of mixed materials — wooden pegs, cardboard tubes, fabric offcuts, stones, shells, bottle caps, small cardboard boxes, corks — and offer them to your toddler with no instructions and no demonstration. Watch what happens.
The Lorrikeets connection: Construction play in our Lorrikeets room uses blocks, stacking materials, and sorting activities to develop spatial awareness, problem-solving, and fine motor skills. But the most powerful version of this — loose parts play — involves materials with no predetermined use, giving children complete creative agency.
What children are building:
When a toddler stacks a cork on a stone on a cardboard tube and watches it fall, they are conducting a physics experiment. When they sort pebbles by size, they are doing mathematics. When they arrange fabric and shells into something they call “a house for a bug,” they are doing architecture, narrative, and science simultaneously.
Research in early childhood education consistently finds that open-ended, self-directed construction play produces stronger outcomes in creativity, persistence, spatial reasoning, and executive function than structured, directed activities. The less prescribed the materials, the richer the thinking.
Tip: Resist building alongside your toddler unless invited. Your role here is observer and occasional enthusiastic commentator: “I see you put the big stone at the bottom — what are you going to add next?”
🌿 4. Outdoor Sensory Exploration: The Nature Walk
What it looks like: Slow walk. Garden, street, park, hinterland trail — anywhere outside will do. Bring a small paper bag. The rule: collect things that feel interesting. Back home, spread the collection on a tray and explore: What is rough? What is smooth? What smells? What does the bark feel like compared to the leaf?
The Lorrikeets connection: Our Lorrikeets outdoor program includes climbing, nature exploration, water play, and gardening in our purpose-designed toddler outdoor area. Cooroy and the Noosa hinterland offer some of the most extraordinary natural environments in southeast Queensland — and bringing that environment into your toddler’s sensory vocabulary is one of the most locally resonant things a family can do.
What children are building:
Sensory exploration builds the proprioceptive and tactile processing systems that underpin physical coordination, emotional regulation, and focused attention. Exposure to natural materials — bark, soil, leaves, seeds — develops environmental awareness from the earliest years, embedding sustainability as a felt value rather than an abstract concept.
Nature Play QLD highlights that children who engage regularly with natural environments develop healthy, resilient bodies and are stimulated cognitively and physically in ways that built environments cannot replicate. In the Noosa hinterland, your backyard is one of the richest early learning environments available.
Tip: Let your toddler lead the pace entirely. A 45-minute walk that covers 50 metres of ground is a more valuable learning experience than a purposeful hike.
📖 5. Story Basket: Storytelling Beyond the Book
What it looks like: Choose a favourite book and gather three or four small objects that relate to the story — a toy animal, a leaf, a small blanket, a cup. Read the story once, then put the book away and let your toddler retell the story using the objects however they choose.
The Lorrikeets connection: Literacy experiences in the Lorrikeets room include storytelling, book exploration, and language-rich experiences that build early literacy skills. But what develops literacy most powerfully at this age is not passive listening — it is active retelling, predicting, and story-making.
What children are building:
When a 2–3 year old retells a story — even if their version bears only passing resemblance to the original — they are doing something neurologically profound. They are sequencing events (narrative structure), recalling characters and details (working memory), using descriptive language (vocabulary development), and inhabiting a story world (imaginative play). Each of these is a building block of reading comprehension.
Australian research published in the Early Childhood Education Journal found that children who engage in active story retelling and dramatic story play from toddlerhood develop significantly stronger literacy outcomes in their early school years. The story basket is one of the simplest, most powerful literacy tools a family can use at home.
Tip: Ask open questions as your toddler plays: “What happened next? How did the bear feel? What do you think they did after that?” Then listen without correcting. Their version is the right version.
🎭 6. Dramatic Play: Be the Animal
What it looks like: Pick an animal from the Noosa hinterland or one your toddler loves — a lorikeet, a frog, a wallaby, a possum. Research it together (a quick picture search is enough). Then become it. How does it move? What does it eat? What sound does it make? Build a “habitat” from cushions, blankets, and whatever is nearby.
The Lorrikeets connection: Dramatic play is one of the six core activity types in our Lorrikeets room — and it is perhaps the one that most visibly demonstrates what play-based learning actually means. When children play roles, they are not escaping from learning. They are doing some of the most complex cognitive and social work available to them.
What children are building:
Dramatic play simultaneously develops language (narrating, describing, naming), social cognition (understanding perspective and role), emotional literacy (inhabiting a character’s experience), physical coordination (moving like a frog requires genuine body awareness), and scientific knowledge (what does a lorikeet actually eat?).
The Cooroy and Noosa hinterland context makes this activity particularly rich. Children growing up in one of the most ecologically diverse regions in Queensland have access to a cast of real, local animal characters — from rainbow lorikeets to koalas to echidnas — that make dramatic play simultaneously a form of environmental education.
Tip: Stay in character alongside your child for as long as you can manage. The moment a parent becomes genuinely invested in the drama, the play deepens dramatically.
🌱 7. The Toddler Garden: Planting, Watering, Watching
What it looks like: A single pot, some potting mix, a seed packet (herbs and cherry tomatoes are perfect for toddlers — fast-growing, tangible, and edible). Let your toddler do everything: scoop the soil, push the seed in with their finger, water gently, mark the pot with a painted stick.
The Lorrikeets connection: Gardening and outdoor nature exploration are embedded in the Fireflies program across all age groups — reflecting our deep commitment to sustainability and environmental connection as core values, not curriculum add-ons. The toddler garden extends this into the home beautifully.
What children are building:
Gardening with a toddler is a patience exercise for the adult and a masterclass in science for the child. The sequence of planting → tending → waiting → growth teaches cause and effect, the concept of time and change, responsibility, and the fundamental scientific truth that living things have needs. When the seedling appears, the look on a toddler’s face is one of the purest expressions of the scientific mind encountering the world and finding it astonishing.
The EYLF V2.0 explicitly identifies sustainability and respect for the natural world as principles that should run through early childhood education from the earliest years. A toddler who has grown a tomato from a seed is already living these values.
Tip: Water the pot together every morning. Make it a ritual. Toddlers thrive on predictable, meaningful routines — and gardening with a parent is one of the most grounding of all.
The Thread That Connects Them All
If these seven activities have something in common — beyond being achievable, low-cost, and genuinely good fun — it is this: they all put the child at the centre. They follow the child’s curiosity, honour the child’s pace, and trust the child’s instincts about what is interesting and worth investigating.
That is the heart of the Lorrikeets room at Fireflies Early Learning. And it is, not coincidentally, the heart of the EYLF V2.0’s vision of quality early childhood education: a child who is capable, curious, and full of potential, given an environment and a relationship that lets all of that bloom.
You do not need to replicate our centre at home. You just need to follow your toddler. They will show you exactly where the learning is.
Come and See the Lorrikeets Room for Yourself
If you have a child aged 2–3 years and you would like to see the Lorrikeets room in person — to meet our educators, explore our toddler outdoor area, and experience the warm, nature-inspired environment that makes Fireflies Early Learning special — we would love to show you around.
📞 (07) 5309 1100
📧 hello@firefliesearlylearning.com.au
📍 22 Kauri Street, Cooroy QLD 4563
🌐 Book a Tour →
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Every little explorer deserves a space where their wings can grow.
Sources: Early Years Learning Framework V2.0 (EYLF) — Belonging, Being and Becoming, Australian Government Department of Education (acecqa.gov.au); Early Childhood Education Journal — Oral language and emergent literacy in early childhood (Springer Nature, 2022); Nature Play QLD / Outdoors Queensland — Benefits of nature play for infants and toddlers (natureplayqld.org.au); ACECQA — Play-based learning and intentionality (acecqa.gov.au); Queensland Kindergarten Learning Guidelines (QKLG) 2024, QCAA (qcaa.qld.gov.au); Raising Children Network — Play and development for toddlers (raisingchildren.net.au); Australian Institute of Family Studies — Early childhood learning through play (aifs.gov.au).